> Ok, now that you all have had time to play with this, please explain why this
> is less difficult and unwieldy than mod_rewrite.
Okay, that's a fair comment. If the original goal was to make the
dispatch routes clear and free of line noise, then adding regexes to
them is probably not helpful.
> Thirdly: Links belong in my templates, not in my app, so I have no business
> knowing how to generate them.
I agree with Dan Horne's remark later in this thread. Links are
positioned and styled and worded in the templates, but if an URL is
essentially a piece of code, why should it be constructed by the
designer?
> Quarto: If the idea behind pretty urls is hiding the implementation details,
> then the dispatcher should be decoupled from the app as much as possible too.
> It should not need to know whether the app is RoR, Struts, Catalyst, or a
> plain shell script. And we already have that in the form of mod_rewrite(*).
I think this is a noble goal. And if we leave aside the link
generation side of things for a moment, maybe it's possible to achieve
this with mod_rewrite alone. I'm not very familiar with mod_rewrite, so
maybe it would meet my needs. Here's a dispatch table, using the
proposed syntax:
'arch/:path' => { app => 'Blog::Archive' },
'admin/tmpl_edit/:path' => { app => 'Blog::Admin::Tmpl_Editor' },
'admin/:controller/:rm' => { prefix => 'Blog::Admin' },
':controller/:rm' => { prefix => 'Blog::' },
This would dispatch the following example URLs as follows:
/arch/foo/bar.html => Blog::Arch (path = /foo/bar.html)
/arch/other.html => Blog::Arch (path = /other.html)
/admin/users/edit => Blog::Admin::Users (rm = edit)
/admin/users/edit_process => Blog::Admin::Users (rm = edit_process)
/comment/add => Blog::Comment (rm = add)
/admin/tmpl_edit/a.html => Blog::Admin::Tmpl_Editor (path = /a.html)
How would this be done with mod_rewrite? Without knowing too much about
rewrite, I can see a few immediate challenges:
* how to dispatch directly to Perl C::A modules without using an
intermediate CGI script for each app
* how to handle capitalization of module names (tmpl_editor vs.
Tmpl_Editor)
Finally, one of the things I do at work is share the same codebase
amongst multiple sites. So 'Blog::Admin::Foo' might actually be
transformed into 'Site1::Blog::Admin::Foo' or 'Site9::Blog::Admin::Foo'.
These classes are generated dynamically at request time if they don't
already exist, using something like this:
@Site1::Blog::Admin::Foo::ISA = ('Common::Blog::Admin::Foo');
This allows me to add site-specific behaviour on a case-by-case basis by
dropping in a subclass for a specific app. But for the most part, the
app directory for most sites is empty.
I have a feeling that if I wanted to use mod_rewrite I would end up
writing a dispatch.cgi anyways, except instead of dispatching based on
the contents of PATH_INFO, it would dispatch based on the contents of
the CGI $query.
Michael
---
Michael Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cgiapp&r=1&w=2
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
